Rocket Ship Galileo (12 page)

He had landed the rocket faced west; it would save jacking her around as well.

Buchanan looked the layout over and asked where the jets would splash. Cargraves showed him. Whereupon Buchanan asked, “Have you arranged for any guards?”

In truth, Cargraves had forgotten it. “Never mind,” said Buchanan, “I’ll call Captain Taylor and get some state police over.”

“Never mind calling; we’ll radio. Art!”

The press started showing up at four; by the time the state police arrived, Cargraves knew that he had been saved real grief. The place was crowded. Escorts were necessary from the outer gate to the corral to make sure that no one drove on the danger-studded mock-battle fields. Once in the corral it took the firm hand of the state police to keep them there—and to keep them from swarming over the ship.

At five they ate their last breakfast in the camp, with a guard at the door to give them some peace. Cargraves refused to be interviewed; he had prepared a typed hand-out and given copies to Buchanan to distribute. But the boys were buttonholed whenever his back was turned. Finally Captain Taylor assigned a bodyguard to each.

They marched in a hollow square of guards to the ship. Flash guns dazzled their eyes and television scanners followed their movements. It seemed impossible that this was the same lonely spot where, only hours before, they had worried about silent prowlers in the dark.

Cargraves had the boys climb in, then turned to Buchanan and Captain Taylor. “Ten minutes, gentlemen. Are you sure you can keep everybody clear? Once I get in the seat I can’t see the ground near me.”

“Don’t worry, Captain Cargraves,” Taylor assured him. “Ten minutes it is.”

Buchanan stuck out his hand. “Good luck, Doctor. Bring me back some green cheese.”

A man came puffing up, dodged past a guard, and thrust a folded paper in Cargraves’ hand. “Here, what’s this?” demanded Taylor. “Get back where you belong.”

The man shrugged. “It’s a court order.”

“Eh? What sort?”

“Temporary injunction against flying this ship. Order to appear and show cause why a permanent injunction should not be issued to restrain him from willfully endangering the lives of minors.”

Cargraves stared. It felt to him as if the world were collapsing around him. Ross and Art appeared at the door behind him. “Doc, what’s up?”

“Hey, there! You boys—come down out of there,” yelled the stranger, and then said to Captain Taylor, “I’ve got another paper directing me to take them in charge on behalf of the court.”

“Get back in the ship,” Cargraves ordered firmly, and opened the paper. It seemed in order. State of New Mexico and so forth. The stranger began to expostulate. Taylor took him by the arm.

“Take it easy,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Cargraves. “Mr. Buchanan, can I have a word with you? Captain, will you hang on to this character?”

“Now, I don’t want any beef,” protested the stranger. “I’m just carrying out my duty.”

“I wonder,” Cargraves said thoughtfully. He led Buchanan around the nose of the craft and showed him the paper.

“It seems to be in order,” Buchanan admitted.

“Maybe. This says it’s the order of a
state
court. This is federal territory, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, Captain Taylor and his men are here only by your invitation and consent. Isn’t that right?”

“Hmmm…yes. That’s so.” Buchanan suddenly jammed the paper in his pocket. “I’ll fix his clock!”

“Just a minute.” Cargraves told him rapidly about the phony inspector, and the prowlers, matters which he had kept to himself, save for a letter to the Washington CAB office. “This guy may be a phony, or a stooge of a phony. Don’t let him get away until you check with the court that supposedly issued this order.”

“I won’t!”

They went back, and Buchanan called Taylor aside. Cargraves took the stranger by the arm, not gently. The man protested. “How would you like a poke in the eye?” Cargraves inquired.

Cargraves was six inches taller, and solid. The man shut up. Taylor and Buchanan came back in a moment or two. The state policeman said, “You are due to take off in three minutes, Captain. I had better be sure the crowd is clear.” He turned and called out, “Hey! Sergeant Swanson!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Take charge of this guy.” It was the stranger, not Cargraves, whom he indicated.

Cargraves climbed in the ship. As he turned to close the door a cheer, ragged at first but growing to a solid roar, hit him. He clamped the door and locked it, then turned. “Places, men.”

Art and Ross trotted to their hammocks, directly behind the pilots’ seats. These hammocks were vertical, more like stretchers braced upright than garden hammocks. They snapped safety belts across their knees and chests.

Morrie was already in his chair, legs braced, safety belts buckled, head back against the shock pad. Cargraves slipped into the seat beside him, favoring his bad foot as he did so. “All set, Morrie.” His eyes glanced over the instrument board, particularly noticing the temperature of the zinc and the telltale for position of the cadmium damping plates.

“All set, Captain. Give her the gun when you are ready.”

He buckled himself in and glanced out the quartz glass screen ahead of him. The field was clear as far as he could see. Staring straight at him, round and beautiful, was their destination. Under his right hand, mounted on the arm rest, was a large knurled knob. He grasped it.

“Art?”

“Ready sir.”

“Ross?”

“Ready, Captain.”

“Co-pilot?”

“Ready, Captain. Time, six-oh-one.”

He twisted the knob slowly to the right. Back behind him, actuated by remote control, cadmium shields slowly withdrew from between lattices of graphite and thorium; uncountable millions of neutrons found it easier to seek atoms of thorium to destroy. The tortured nuclei, giving up the ghost, spent their energy in boiling the molten zinc.

The ship began to tremble.

With his left hand he cut in the nose rockets, balancing them against the increasing surge from the rear. He slapped in the belly jets; the ship reared. He let the nose jets die.

The
Galileo
leaped forward, pressing them back into their pads.

They were headed skyward, out and far.

INTO THE LONELY DEPTHS

• 9 •

TO ROSS AND ART THE WORLD
seemed to rotate dizzily through ninety degrees. They had been standing up, strapped to their upright hammocks, and staring straight forward past Cargraves and Morrie out through the conning port at the moon and the western horizon.

When the rocket took off it was as if they had been suddenly forced backwards, flat on their backs and pushed heavily into the cushions and springs. Which, in a way, was exactly what had happened to them. It was the powerful thrust of the jet which had forced them back against the springs and held them there. The force of the drive made the direction they were traveling “up.”

But the moon still stared back at them, dead ahead through the port; “up” was also “west.” From where they lay, flat on their backs, Cargraves and Morrie were above them and were kept from falling on them by the heavy steel thrust members which supported the piloting chairs.

The moon shimmered and boiled under the compression waves of air. The scream of the frantic molecules of air against the skin of the craft was louder and even more nerve-racking than steady thunder of the jet below them. The horizon dropped steadily away from the disk of the moon as they shot west and gained altitude. The sky, early morning gray as they took off, turned noonday blue as their flat climb took them higher and higher into the sunlight.

The sky started to turn purple and the stars came out. The scream of the air was less troublesome. Cargraves cut in his gyros and let Joe the Robot correct his initial course; the moon swung gently to the right about half its width and steadied. “Everybody all right?,” he called out, his attention free of the controls for a moment.

“Swell!” Art called back.

“Somebody’s sitting on my chest,” Ross added.

“What’s that?”

“I say, somebody’s sitting on my chest!” Ross shouted.

“Well, wait a bit. His brother will be along in a minute.”

“What did you say?”

“
Never mind!
” Cargraves shouted. “It wasn’t important. Co-pilot!”

“Yes, Captain!”

“I’m going into full automatic. Get ready to check our course.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Morrie clamped his octant near his face and shifted his head a little so that he could see the scope of the belly radar easily. He dug his head into the pads and braced his arms and hands; he knew what was coming. “Astrogator ready!”

The sky was black now and the stars were sharp. The image of the moon had ceased to shake and the unearthly scream of the air had died away, leaving only the tireless thunder of the jet. They were above the atmosphere, high and free.

Cargraves yelled, “Hang on to your hats, boys!
Here we go!
” He turned full control over to Joe the robot pilot. That mindless, mechanical-and-electronic worthy figuratively shook his non-existent head and decided he did not like the course. The image of the moon swung “down” and toward the bow, in terms of the ordinary directions in the ship, until the rocket was headed in a direction nearly forty degrees further east than was the image of the moon.

Having turned the ship to head for the point where the moon would be when the
Galileo
met it, rather than headed for where it now was, Joe turned his attention to the jet. The cadmium plates were withdrawn a little farther; the rocket really bit in and began to dig.

Ross found that there was indeed a whole family on his chest. Breathing was hard work and his eyes seemed foggy.

If Joe had had feelings he need have felt no pride in what he had just done, for his decisions had all been made for him before the ship left the ground. Morrie had selected, with Cargraves’ approval, one of several three-dimensional cams and had installed it in Joe’s innards. The cam “told” Joe what sort of a course to follow to the moon, what course to head first, how fast to gun the rocket and how long to keep it up. Joe could not see the moon—Joe had never heard of the moon—but his electronic senses could perceive how the ship was headed in relation to the steady, unswerving spin of the gyros and then head the ship in the direction called for by the cam in his tummy.

The cam itself had been designed by a remote cousin of Joe’s, the great “Eniac” computer at the University of Pennsylvania. By means of the small astrogation computer in the ship either Morrie or Cargraves could work out any necessary problem and control the
Galileo
by hand, but Joe, with the aid of his cousin, could do the same thing better, faster, more accurately and with unsleeping care—provided the human pilot knew what to ask of him and how to ask it.

Joe had not been invented by Cargraves; thousands of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians had contributed to his existence. His grandfathers had guided the Nazi V-2 rockets in the horror-haunted last days of World War II. His fathers had been developed for the deadly, ocean-spanning guided-missiles of the UN world police force. His brothers and sisters were found in every rocket ship, private and commercial, passenger-carrying or unmanned, that cleft the skies of earth.

Trans-Atlantic hop or trip to the moon, it was all one to Joe. He did what his cam told him to do. He did not care, he did not even know.

Cargraves called out, “How you making out down there?”

“All right, I guess,” Ross answered, his voice laboring painfully.

“I feel sick,” Art admitted with a groan.

“Breathe through your mouth. Take deep breaths.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, hang on. It won’t be long.”

In fact it was only fifty-five seconds at full drive until Joe, still advised by his cam, decided that they had had enough of full drive. The cadmium plates slid farther back into the power pile, thwarting the neutrons; the roar of the rocket drive lessened.

The ship did not slow down; it simply ceased to accelerate so rapidly. It maintained all the speed it had gained and the frictionless vacuum of space did nothing to slow its headlong plunge. But the acceleration was reduced to one earth-surface gravity, one
g
, enough to overcome the powerful tug of the earth’s mighty weight and thereby permit the ship to speed ahead unchecked—a little less than one
g
, in fact, as the grasp of the earth was already loosening and would continue to drop off to the change-over, more than 200,000 miles out in space, where the attraction of the moon and that of the earth are equal.